NTOK

40 square blocks were destroyed, thousands dead.

We have heard "36 square blocks were destroyed" said a thousand times.  That was NORTH TULSA, 1921. The statement above about 40 destroyed square blocks was Ukraine, 2022.

It peeked my attention because for 100 years we've been guessing how many North Tulsans died when a mass mob shot, burned, looted and bombed a population of 11,000, with about 6,000 accounted for after the embers were out.  5,000 is an awful lot of people to never receive a letter from, never hear thousands of their children, tens of thousands of their grandchildren and great grandchildren talk about...there is one book, published in the 1990s, written about the massacre by a survivor. One. 

But, miraculously, there are survivors from those two days in American history whose eyewitness accounts still have some chance of helping us do what did not happen in 1921...and what is not happening in 2022.

Stand up for what is right.

JUSTICE FOR GREENWOOD, a local organization, is giving us all an opportunity to do just that everyday this week.

According to JUSTICE FOR GREENWOOD, next Monday, on May 2, "members of the Greenwood descendant community" will be joined by "Tulsans in demanding justice for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and its continuous harm" at the Tulsa County Courthouse at 1p. 

The organization sent out this message: We are just days away from Monday, May 2—the date of the historic motion to dismiss hearing where Tulsa County Judge Caroline Wall will hear our plea to allow the pursuit for justice for the Tulsa Race Massacre to continue. 

The urgency...the court is set to either allow the case for justice for 1921 to proceed or dismiss the case, altogether.

We may never know the number of people who died from north or south of Main Street in May and June of 1921, but, there is no mystery about who took on the job of rebuilding the Greenwood section of NORTH TULSA. The population that had grown from 6,000 to nearly 80,000 by the year 2000 built and rebuilt Greenwood/aka BLACK WALL STREET and NORTH TULSA many times over. 

Our great-grandparents, our grandparents, parents, teachers, pastors, friends, neighbors kept life together in NORTH TULSA, flourishing for nearly a century. Over a century ago, the handful of Black pioneer families who founded First Baptist North Tulsa in the 1890s were joined by thousands of other families who would, over time, design and build thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses and churches, and dozens of schools and social institutions, today, stretching thousands of acres beyond Greenwood.

A dismissal verdict will be a heavy blow toward turning all that work into dust.

The hard pill to swallow is knowing most of that work took place during decades when North Tulsans had zero official political representation or power or status in the city of Tulsa or the state of Oklahoma. On the contrary, but for Tulsa County and the US federal government, schools and civil rights in NORTH TULSA would have, long ago, met the same fate its Greenwood district met in 1921.

But, they didn't.

NORTH TULSA, still, as my dad always said, is "The greatest place on Earth."

R. Clardy/NTm 

4/25/2022

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